Samsung’s latest Ultrabook SSD achieves 2.15GB/s read speeds

The image you see above is the SSD you’ll want to have inside your next laptop. It’s Samsung’s latest PCIe flash drive, and it can achieve 2.15GB/s read speeds and a still impressive 1.55GB/s write speeds.

Such ridiculous data transfer speeds are made possible by ditching the more standard SATA connection for PCIe, and it has to be PCIe 3.0. This new drive, which Samsung has given the memorable name of SM951, will also work over a PCIe 2.0 connection, but read and write speeds are then limited to 1.6GB/s and 1.35GB/s respectively. That’s still great, but not awesome.

The other good news about the SM951 is power use. Compared to the drive it is replacing, the XP941, it’s 50 percent more efficient. By using the L1.2 low power standby mode that the PCIe standard now allows, power draw is below 2mW when in a standby state. That’s 97 percent lower than the 50mW it requires when being fully utilized by a system.

Weighing in at 6 grams and being a seventh of the size of a 2.5-inch SSD, Samsung won’t be short of orders for this new drive from Ultrabook manufacturers. I can see the SM951 finding its way into refreshes of this year’s MacBook Air, for example, it may even be in that rumored 12-inch model. As for capacity, Samsung will be making 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB models available.

With such massive speed gains over what is possible on a SATA-connected SSD, it’s no surprise that PCIe SSDs are appearing for use in desktop machines. However, they are currently seriously overpriced and from what I’ve heard there’s still a lot of work to do on the software that manages their functionality.